Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel

by Hortense Calisher

  And having already the reverse advantage of caste, we have also these possibilities of misalliance and miscegenation which make Our world a livelier place to live in and gossip about—such as the lung-dreamer’s taste for the postcard type, or the actual sight of some great, fair heart-One going off into the bush with some dark little exoticker. For, due to our transparency and sameness, the nature of our dream organs is perceptibly evident in the complexions, and most of us can spell these out pretty well. We feel that this is the grace always granted on the other side of sinfulness. For, even among Us, there has to be some way to tell.

  And finally, there is one more possibility—certainly by now you will have thought of it? Since it vitally concerns me, I shall approach it gradually, as I am able. For, should you ever come to us, you will see well enough how, from one world to another, these modesties cling. Wait, for instance, until the first time you have to turn off your electrical field and just stand there. Whereas I am utterly hardened to that, and—alas for it, in my world—to much more. But let me now go back to the spectacle of me lying there prone in that glass house in Bucks, hoping that as I talk, what I am hinting at will steal over you, in mutual embarrassment. Let me tell you the nature—and icon—of my dream.

  Well, I was lying there, trying out my humilities, such a whole arpeggio of aches that there was no use trying to poultice them up one at a time. What was needed was a whole lovely web of dream, and I knew well enough where to find it, having done so more often than I care to say. Finally, I gave in. I began, in the usual way, the usual interior imaginings. When I tell you that I had no allegiance to one single organ, you may guess that there was indeed something very wrong with me. For a while, as preamble, I did entertain myself with visions of myself with heart, myself with lungs, et cetera, all separately. But very quickly I advanced—and here began the real dreaming—to a vision of such a being as … Such a Being … as might have, inside itself, such organs … and in such an intertwined congress of processes inter-and infra-parietal, peritoneal, pericardial and perichondrial … such a being as in fact might have them all. So far had I come then in dreaming, that one would have thought this sufficient of evil. But—no. Are you beginning to suspect? I fear you may be, but in the wrong direction.

  You are thinking perhaps, that in all the categories I haven’t mentioned your reproductive ones? True, but not because we don’t know of them. We do envision these, but as the most vestigial of organs, in no way—as the other organs might still be—pertinent to our way of life. And though even these poor primitifs have their devotees, the latter Ones have no status among us and are indeed considered—Well, they are called—silly. To be a One of these worshippers is scarcely to be venial, merely ridiculous.

  Or have you guessed that I wasn’t quite truthful when I said that we never lie down? Well, I wasn’t, but only out of a decent sense of reserve toward those of our old Ones who manage to do so before we can push them back into the lava stream of Return. The majority of these do it because they can’t help themselves. Now and then we have a few rakes who prate of leaning in that position, but this is mere senility, and is quickly taken care of. The overwhelming majority of us elect to elide permanently before we reach either of these pitiable states. Once an Ellipse is down, it’s Out.

  And now … I must. Now, since our flesh is at least cognate, brood with me, tremble over the abyss of such a One as I. Even to imagine such a supremely equipped being was not enough for me, a being having within it a pleiades and more of organs at their music, or, if you prefer—and as we were reared to rate it in comparison with our veils within veils—such a monster of the lowest obscenities of matter. No, I had to be One to crawl out on the farthest cliff of the imagination; I had had the arrogance to dream—So. Ah? Yes. I had become a One who could in fancy assault the holiest—our pure Outline. At night, such an army of incubi and succubi attacked me, such nightmare visions of how that most perfect of curves might be contorted, that although as yet I hadn’t the vaguest of preferences toward these appendages and indentations, and was even affrighted to envision any being who might own them, much less myself, I had for safety’s sake given up leaning altogether. Later on, in those months when I was listening to your signals, I discovered among Us a little band of Others like me; I was not alone. But I must confess it fully now, and of course now that I am Here it is easier. In Ours, I was without honor. I was one of those whose imagination dared do violence to the very form decreed for us in perpetual onus. Yes, I am that One. I am a pervert.

  Thank God for travel.

  For what an exquisite relief it could be, this lying prone! Especially must it be regarded here, I mused, as that dear posture in which one smiles backward at the anxieties of yesterday, lulla-lulla, and can perhaps even anticipate a change of shape one might just have the luck to earn or fall into, on the morrow. Above me, on the shelves, were the picture books of all the fauna here down the geological ages, those great plates I had so pored over during my early incubation here, wondering which of those shapes would turn out to be Yours—and in time, in the foolness of time, perhaps Mine. Although at that period I had been unable to focus on the print of the descriptions, each large plate was accompanied by enough small ones to give me a fairly canny idea of each creature’s habits, habitats and foods. Nothing gave any suggestion that all these magnificoes—I had after a few days persuaded myself not to regard them as terrors—did not exist simultaneously, our Now being so different from your little “now.” My real shock at the sight of all this—all these waving waterfalls of mane, saurian extensions, anthropoid pugs, rhino-ish craters and cattish patterns under which the pure oval had forever vanished—was not so much at the extremity of the exaggerations, as after a while an intense irritation, then a degrading melancholia, over the piffling scope of my own. How wee, shrunken and ignominious those defamatory little sins-against-the-curve such as I had been able to imagine. In the face of this grandeur, I was scarcely a pervert at all.

  Once I had got over this, I had to buckle down to an important question: when presented a choice of all this imperial grab bag, which shape would I choose to become? Try as I did, I could raise no enthusiasm to be any of these creatures, much less that lyric rush of self-discovery which had been the lecher-hope of my small dreams. But the primer had certainly promised a change. For hours I pored over the herbivores and the carnivores, unable to decide between them, or to come to any conclusion other than that, if it were left to me, I should fancy a little fur. In the intervals, I searched in vain for pictures of that Lava-stream which must produce them, but although I kept forever coming upon mountains which almost lifted themselves from the page, and vegetation-rimmed tarns of a certain mystery, there seemed to be nothing akin to Our all-embracing system, and not much coherence that I could descry, to any. There was a day when, suddenly noticing a preponderance of eggs, I brooded over this at first wistfully, then almost angrily—they had promised more of a change than this. I had no choice really but to trust them.

  So, when the dialogues started, I kept my own counsel, in time came to understand my delusion, and began to be taught my real profit. The shape I would sin under was not going to be left up to me; this they call resignation. Almost as with us, except for that subdivision which was still to be understood, there was One creature here only. And as I lay there now, I practiced ever newer dreams of this being, manufactured out of fresher, more sophisticated dissatisfactions—give or take a tusk or two, subtract a horn there. And after an hour or two of this pleasantest of siesta occupations, I made an accordingly new discovery. Posture! Perhaps only a One of an essentially gyroscopic people, used to the luxury of moving pavements in whose trolley grooves We may incline all at the same comfortable angle, can appreciate how basic is posture here to the rhythms of philosophy, and indeed to the practice of ideals. How sensitively I was getting to understand you. It was not wholly comfortable then, to lie too long prone.

  And no sooner had I discovered this, than I felt myself pu
lled powerfully upright, as eager for action as if I had just bounded out of the crater. At home, my line of action would have been ready for me; here it took only nominally longer for posture to suggest one. Carefully, very carefully this time, I approached the door. At this point in my education I had never really seen one up close; what has instantaneity to do with doors? Answer: it learns to reason itself through them, just as you, by reverse process, will soon find yourselves flashily able to do forever without them. At a certain distance, I found that, even when thinking the most lethargic thoughts and overcasting myself with the heaviest feelings I yet knew, there was still an unnatural tension between door and me, which boded ill. Then suddenly the source of it occurred to me; my electrical field was being opposed by another. Even their doors wear them, I thought. And perhaps not only their doors, perhaps all other objects which might offer resistance of any kind are required to be clothed so, while they themselves walk nakedly, proudly among these obeisant; what aristocrats they are! And I—?

  And I. When Here, do as Here does. But be sure to emulate those who are in power. I must run no risk of having them confuse me with low-grade matter. It requires only a particular thought for us to discard our Field, the trouble being only that it is such a particular one, and illegal too. Perhaps it wouldn’t work as well here. Taking a cautious breath, I found that since the last time I had practiced this heresy, the wholesomely coarser air of Yours had so clogged the finer pores that I was enabled to sustain a thought without fairly recognizing that I was doing it—and that this furthermore seemed to add substantially to my weight. Sure enough, shortly I began to feel the familiar chilliness which always comes of lowering one’s protective field, and happening to shiver, this inched me slightly doorwards—and sure enough, the door inched slowly and equally toward me. Some thoughts must be illegal anywhere. For good measure, I made so bold as to half hum it, meanwhile keeping my real thoughts trolleying along a loftier neighborhood; there’s always some niche of the intelligence that one must keep to oneself.

  “I am …” I murmured, “… I am … an Original.” This time the door didn’t budge. But by dint of trial I found that as I moved forward, and only under the influence of this, the door would move compatibly outward. What courtesy, even in inferior matter, here! Slowly, majestically dipping my angle at a nice compromise between a taking-this-for-granted and a thank-you, I inched myself along without accident, until the door and I were in equipoise. I was almost outside it. Outside, on Here.

  By hook or crook then, I was almost safely through the second phase of my journey. For, awesome as the interstellar reaches may be to the lone traveler, or even to the caravan which must track those Saharas of cosmic dust, there had come a point in my journey when it was the destination which became the dread. Did they really have water in a liquid state? I could not survive without it. Should I have trusted them, when they reported themselves as beings with the same needs as I, molded by the same natural forces? Not that I was suspicious of their intent—but after all, they were only a third-generation star. Young as they were, must one not have a low view of intellectual powers which had taken all of their history to discover other presences, and the possible pulsings between them? Granted We and They had mutually significant symbols and meanings, but imagine Our dismay when informed that they still read and wrote! Could beings like Us, who are in Ourselves practically all electronic meaning, go backward as far as these beings on the other side of their “Milky Way” thought they had gone forward; could we mutate enough, and quickly so, to touch arc on their planet? To dare to do this, I had gone against all home Opinion. And so far, with the help of arrangements-in-waiting, plans had gone remarkably. But, as I peered outside that glass door, I remembered my misgivings just a few moments before landing. Behind me, improbably far along the empyrean reaches, Ours, that long teardrop of a planet, lay somewhere shrouded as I had last seen it, nestling deep in its filtered atmospheres, a jewel once upon a time massively wept. As I had reined in on Yours, a mere toy ball lost on its cloud stubble, waiting to be picked up again in play—my last thought had been: yes, I can land Here—but can I live?

  Such thoughts as one can have behind a door here! Just beyond the threshold the air was heavy, but I reminded myself how much I myself had changed during my weeks here. When, by infinite creepings I found myself still alive and breathing, no more WHAM’s and the door still courteous, I made the last inch or two; behind me, the door modestly retired—and shut. I had no thought at the time of whether it would readmit me, or where I was going. All the prospect of your world was before me, terminated in the distance—according to the limits of sight here, to which mine was fast declining—by a pergola. I remained for some minutes as I was, faintly chilly, daring nothing, taking stock. I was Here. I was Outside. And I was naked as the day Yours are born.

  If you could attach a tiny camera to the eye of the newborn here, would it bring back data more vital than those mechanisms that hit your moon? I doubt it, for there is so much more than sight at stake. To understand that first unfolding receptivity, the interpreters would themselves have to be reborn. In this way, and entirely opposite to Us, who slip upward already complete and serenely equal with our crater-watchers, you keep a constant spawning of what you call “ignorance.” And the drama of learning it away from itself, while it battles to get back to what it faintly dreams it surely knew, is what is here called “a life.” In my way I was at this moment analogous to your newborn; I was in fact seventy-eight inches of naked cornea, but of that moment when your world moved in on me so powerfully and I as powerfully mutated toward it, I retain only the memory of its collision and blend. Among all the impressions since, this vague memory—as of a lost difference at the back of “now”—is the least describable. Yet I feel as you do; if I could find it again I would have something of utter value. What I describe is the moment after.

  Though this was my first free view of your world in what you so endearingly persist in calling the round, I was of course already window-bred to the gently mammary landscape before me, and to its verdure. This latter I had already seen in the photostats, often in forms fiercer and more variant; in fact it was by gazing thoughtfully back and forth first at these then through the window that I had gained a composite of what plant life is here. We too have our trees, archaically preserved under glass now, since with the reversal of atmosphere and our refinement of it, they and we are no longer in such a complementary gaseous relationship as they and you. Indeed, they are our living treasures, visited in museums as you do your dead ones. We like to watch their pause-poise. Other plants we have too, but never except under the most severe guard—as you occasionally guard flame. Grass, though known of—ah, indeed, indeed, indeed!—is forbidden, and hopefully extinct. For, in the seamlessness of our chemiformically paved cities, and under the ever-spreading, plastic mildness of buildings which have been taught to repeat themselves whenever necessary in units of fortified ground granite and repressed marble, we have been for some eons safe from sight of terra firma, but even in seamlessness, there is the very danger of seam.

  So, it was no wonder that I gazed for minutes at that wilderness of chlorophyll which would have been both treasure and enemy at home. Although I was by now enough coarsened in my components to be able to amble along and under that green burning in mutual toleration, to do so would nevertheless be an act of daring. And still is, though, just as you do in the performance of unnatural acts, I have taught myself not to flinch. In any case, I cannot resist returning to what seem to me the most marvelous museums of those green forms—which even on Here too are not really random or rampant, but unutterably fixed in their pause-poise—and indeed may be the basic natives of eternal everywhere.

  As I gazed there, already past that other crater-moment, I knew that the scene before me and around me was not the only one in your world; such a mistake I have never once made. I already knew that in and among all the delights or abysses of what you, when you have tamed it, called landscape, a
nd we, when we have conquered it, terra firma, the elements are the same. Still I gazed. Just in the foreground of those changeable ozones they call air here, a smallish tree was turning over and over its paw-shaped leaves, gray to green, green to gray, palm up, palm down. Palm up, palm down, but any advances that were made between tree and me were mine, and at this I felt somewhere within me a certain squeezing. I stared on. Such jewels of the variable are offered you daily, and were now being offered me also—such jewels as I could never in essence hope to touch. Above the tree, in perfect ellipse, a cloud reigned. Pause-poise. Everything was moving here, and yet stood at same. One thing I have learned here which I never could have learned at home—where sameness never moves—and I think I did so at this moment. Palm up, palm down. People are the wilderness.

  I looked away, and there, just entering the pergola, were two of them.

  4. And Around

  AND ONE, THOUGH OF a certain meagerness, was a One of us.

  I had no time more than to make out that the other figure, tall and shrouded in black, was certainly of another order—for at that same second, I unfortunately made a misstep.